It may take a while before the Tune-Up
Café and Dave's Not Here are no longer mentioned in the same breath, but
it will happen--and probably sooner than later.
Dave's Not Here
occupied the converted Hickox Street residence now housing the Tune-Up
Café from 1981 through its closing in early 2008. In more than a
quarter-century, it garnered a significant amount of recognition, almost
as much for its perplexing name as for its inventive menu.
Vestiges of Dave's Not Here remain if
you look closely, but for the most part, it can still be said that
Dave's still not here.
Gone is the colorful artwork on the
restaurant's exterior walls. Part psychedelic tagger art, part
Diego Rivera and maybe just a tad biker art, it had been part of the
fabric of the venerable neighborhood for years.
On the east-facing wall remain the
words "New Mexican Home Cooking," a remnant from the previous tenant,
but not necessarily out-of-place at the Tune-Up Café.
The dining room remains a beckoning
milieu, but it seems more airy and bright, the product of what appears
to be the fresh sheen of several coats of feather-brushed paint.
Not even a mirror on the restaurant's west-facing wall, however, can
make the Tune-Up Café any larger. It's still a tiny restaurant,
albeit one that has a homey feel to it.
The Tune-Up Café is the brainchild of
Jesús
and Charlotte Rivera, both veterans of the Santa Fe
restaurant scene. Jesús
is originally from El Salvador while
Charlotte's roots are in Northern Louisiana. That bodes for an
interesting menu.
Not surprisingly, the menu features
some Salvadoran specialties as well as Mexican and New Mexican entrees
with a smattering of American favorites, too. The Tune-Up Café is
open only for breakfast and lunch though that could change once the
restaurant obtains a liquor license.
The breakfast menu reads like New
Orleans (fresh fruit stuffed French toast) meets New Mexico (breakfast
burrito)and El Salvador (Huevos El Salvadorenos). Who wouldn't
want to wake up to such delicious options.
The lunch menu pays a playful mark of
respect to its predecessor tenant with a burger named "Dave Was Here,"
a burger that feels strangely familiar.
It is one of three burgers on the
menu, including a vegan made burger--the brown rice nut burger, a
housemade patty served on a brioche bun.
The similarities between the "Dave Was
Here" burger and the burgers served by Dave's Not Here (the restaurant
in case you've already begun to forget) start with the sheer size and
volume of these behemoth burgers. Dave's was
famous for its 9-ounce beef patty and the "Dave Was Here" burger has got
to approximate that prodigious size.
There are similar burger toppings,
too, like the green chile, grilled onions and sautéed mushrooms, but the
Tune-Up Café also includes Cheddar, Jack, Blue, Manchego and Provolone
cheeses.
While Dave's Not Here obtained its
beef from a local market, the
Café grinds its beef daily.
One of the biggest differences in the burgers is in the bun. The
Tune-Up Café uses a sesame seed
covered brioche bun from Fano Bakery, a local institution.
The Dave Was Here burger comes
standard with homemade mayo, lettuce, tomato and a pickle spear.
The rest is up to you. The green chile warrants a "gringo" rating
in the piquancy scale, but it's got a nice roasted flavor.
The brioche bun, like so many of the
breads baked at Fano Bakery are hard-crusted and formidable. That
means that unlike so many standard burger buns, it won't wilt and wither
under the weight and moistness of the ingredients you may choose to pile
on. It also means the bun may be a bit chewy, but on the Dave Was
Here, that's a good thing.
You'll have to open up as wide as you
do for your dentist with the Dave Was Here. It's a gigantic burger
with a lot of flavor. All burgers and sandwiches are served with
hand-cut French fries, wholly unlike the cardboard stiff pretenders
served by the fast food chains. These fries are flaccid,
well-salted and greasy, a terrific combination that might just make
these the best fries in town.
Like so many restaurants nowadays, the
Tune-Up Café serves up its own rendition of the popular Cuban sandwich.
Where many Cuban sandwiches in the area seem to be waifishly thin with
parsimoniously portioned ingredients, the Cubano is thick and
generously engorged with its component parts.
The canvass for the Cubano is a
ciabatta roll which is dressed with a citrus and garlic marinated pork
loin, cured ham and Swiss cheese. The menu indicates this sandwich
is pressed, but you wouldn't know it the way the ingredients bulge.
In any case, the restaurant's panini grill must be super-sized to
accommodate the Cubano.
The formidability we liked in the
brioche bun encasing the Dave Was Here burger is what we didn't like on
the ciabatta roll housing the Cubano. The roll was more than a bit
heavy and more chewy than we would have liked, but that was the only
minus.
The Cubano is an excellent sandwich,
one which can easily be shared. It's one of two sandwiches on the
menu, the other being a Ginger Chicken Sandwich on ciabatta with
Provolone and basil aioli.
In the melting pot of cultural cuisine
wrought by the accepting multi-culturalism of the Land of Enchantment,
one which has captured the fancy of many diners is Salvadoran cuisine.
The national snack of El Salvador is
the pupusa, a thick, hand-made corn
tortilla stuffed with sundry ingredients. Unlike New Mexican
tortillas, Salvadoran tortillas are made with no baking powder and very
little (if any) salt. They're made with a maize masa. Of all the
pupusas we've ever had, none have the pronounced corn taste the pupusas
at the Tune-Up Café. None are any bigger.
Where the standard pupusa seems to be
about four-inches, these are roughly the size of a pancake. Two
different pupusas, served two per order, adorn the menu. One is
stuffed with flank steak, chile pasado and queso fresco. It is a
very good rendition of the pupusa.
Accompanying each order of pupusas is
a Salvadoran cabbage salad somewhat resembling the pinkish pickled
relishes served at some Mexican restaurants. Curtido is
made with pickled cabbage, onions and just a hint of red pepper.
This is the best curtido I've ever had, so good it postponed my digging
into the pupusa itself.
In time, people may forget that Dave
ever was here. In time we may forget what life was like without
the Tune-Up Café.
